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Open Source News from FOSDEM 2009 - Day 1

"The process stagnated a bit over the years until Debian
threatened to take out the ONC-RPC code, which in effect meant
taking out glibc4 all together. But Simon was happy to announce
that Sun had finally been able to contact all the authors and get
approval for a license change. Since Thursday February 5th the
ONC-RPC has been relicensed and is now officially free....

"Mark Surman's opening keynote was an interesting insight into
the workings of Mozilla. The official mission statement of Mozilla
states "To guard the open nature of the internet", but what does
this mean for Mozilla's future? How far can it go and what comes
after that...

"Bdale said that Debian has contemplated using a Code of Conduct
similar to what Ubuntu is using, but it is very hard to integrate
something like that into the current structure of Debian. He did
recommend that anyone who wants to start their own Free Software
project use such a Code of Conduct. The Debian Manifesto and Free
Software Guidelines affect the project from a technical point of
view. A Code of Conduct does the same on a social level. A good
Free Software project needs both...

"Transformations are the other new feature that XRandR 1.3 adds.
They make it easy to rotate, flip and scale the display image. It
also adds the ability to do keystone correction, that means
deforming the image by moving the corners. You can use this for
example to correct the display of a beamer that projects at an
angle. I asked Matthias how that works in combination with
compositing which is also able to do these kinds of
transformations. Matthias answered that it works transparently as
it should, but when compositing is available it is better to use
that instead of the XRandR transformations to prevent slowdowns due
to the extra framebuffer copies that need to be stored."